Saw this on Slickdeals.net

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Not sure if this is the best way, so if anyone else has any additional advice, go ahead and let us know.



Web Hosting, Domain Name, Branded Email, and Collaborative Web Apps w/NO MANDATORY ADVERTS - $10/year (the price of domain name registration)
I’ve decided to compile some resources and tips that will allow you to get a domain name, web hosting, a basic CMS, web apps and branded email for about $10/yr. Most people overpay for their hosting needs and use very little of the features they overpaid for.



I think that with a little work and compromise, this combination will be more than suitable for over 70% of people/organizations who want a basic website with standard functions. If you require a shopping cart, FTP access or any detailed custom development, move on… this is not for you. This is for small business owners who traditionally operate in the brick & mortar realm who just want a web presence, groups and individuals who just want a simple website with online collaboration, and anyone else who wants fairly robust layout options, self-publishing capability + an easy to use webmail program (gmail) all while getting a custom domain and (50) email addresses of yourname@yourdomain.com.


The formula goes like this:

1) Free Google Blogger [blogger.com]account (you already have one if you have a Gmail email)
2) + $10 domain purchase (through blogger dashboard via GoDaddy)
3) + Free DropBox [dropbox.com] account (for 2GB of file hosting) or other hotlinkable file host
4) + Free Google Domain Apps Standard Edition [google.com] (when you purchase your domain through Blogger dashboard)
5) + A few CSS tricks to “de-brand” your blog as a Blogger blog.

This is the cheapest feature to price ratio I’ve come across for anyone who wants to build a simple professional looking custom branded website with NO compulsory advertisements (you can actually "monetize" your blog and make money off this with enough traffic... you own the blog and advertisements in this setup).

First sign up and activate your Blogger blog. You can choose any available Prefix so your initial setup blog will look like www.yourdomain.blogspot.com. Blogger is the easiest when it comes to CMS publishing (in my humble opinion… I’ve used several, albeit not as robust as other CMS solutions).

Then go to your dashboard and under Settings, go to Publishing and look for “Need a Domain? Buy One now!”

This will take you to a Google Checkout page (after you choose your available domain). Since you went through Google Checkout, your domain automatically gets a Google Apps for Domains account (Standard Edition) for the domain you just bought. This includes branded email addresses (up to 50 users). These users also get a web based word processor, spreadsheet, drawing app, sharable group calendar and live chat... basically a lot of Google group services. Since you went through the dashboard, all DNS records will automatically be set up to point to your blogspot blog. Easy.

After DNS propagates your changes, your setup blog will now be accessible from www.yourdomain.com.

The Blogger admin allows you to upload images and text for content, but if you want to host the occasional PDF file or other type of file, you need to use another storage option that allows for a hotlink. I like DropBox because they give you 2GB for free and allow about 10GB transfer per file per day (plenty for most scenarios). You can use any other file host that allows hotlinking, like SugarSync or even Google Sites (which you now have access to with your Google Apps for Domains account).

You'll probably now want to “un-bloggify” you blog by removing all the Blogger branding that happens on the page by default. From your dashboard go to Design, then Edit HTML. 

Copy and paste this CSS override stuff in the page header and it will remove the persistent Blogger navigation panel from the top of the page and the Blogger favicon from the address bar.

************************************************** *******


#navbar-iframe {
height:0px;
visibility:hidden;
display:none
}

************************************************** *******

At this point you should now have a "de-branded" website at www.yourdomain.com with a Blogger back-end and a Google Apps super-user (bloggeradmin@yourdomain.com) that you can log in with to create additional email addresses like youruser@yourdomain.com.

* NOTE * When I went through these steps I never had a chance to setup a Google Apps account. It automatically created "bloggeradmin@yourdomain.com". I then navigated to the Control Panel (below) and chose "forgot your admin password". It then sent a reset email to the secondary email on file (which was the original gmail email used to create the Blog).

Google Apps URLs of interest where "yourdomain.com" is the domain you just bought:
Google Docs (for all users): http://docs.google.com/a/yourdomain.com

Now it's just a matter of using the free-form HTML gadgets or other blogger “gadgets” to design and build your pages. These gadgets provide some pretty cool functionality like additional static pages, link lists, polling, video, slide shows, text, followers, feeds, etc. You can actually create some very nice looking websites that don’t even resemble a blog using a Blogger account (I opted to stick with the basic blog template for my music/tech blog [ageofthewheel.com] while customizing a few things). Some even do all their layouts in Photoshop and just host big images with hotspots as their entire site.

Feel free to add any other tips to squeeze the most value out of this setup.

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